Spring’s lush green lawns and hot pink shoes contribute at least in a small way to the world’s total carbon picture, say researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Indeed, the latest fashions on Fifth Avenue and fertilizers that help homeowners achieve that “barefoot” lawn have their associated carbon dioxide costs, and ORNL’s Gregg Marland and Tristram West keep up with them. Their task is to track the total carbon produced worldwide and es

Experiment uses biomolecules to write on a gold substrate Duke University engineers have demonstrated that enzymes can be used to create nanoscale patterns on a gold surface. Since many enzymes are already commercially available and well characterized, the potential for writing with enzyme “ink” represents an important advance in nanomanufacturing. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation through a Nanotechnology Interdisciplinary Research Initiative (NIRT) grant.

A safer way to heat food products that retains nutritional qualities, which experts acknowledge has a positive effect on health, is being developed with the help of €693,000 from the Food Quality and Safety Programme of the European Union’s Framework Programme

In most cases, the production of safe food products requires some form of heat treatment and, in traditional heating methods, the result is often a loss of nutritional quality. This is because the heat is generated outside the food an

The old breakers’ yards, going for a long time, are soon to disappear. The future is now in recycling components from these vehicles and all as a consequence of a new Directive approved by the European Union. The new law came into being in the Spanish State in December 2002. From February of this year the Royal Decree for the Direction General of Traffic obliges owners of vehicles to obtain a certificate of destruction in order to be legally free of contractual ownership of the vehicle. Here, in the

Researchers at Purdue University have developed the first system capable of searching a company’s huge database of three-dimensional parts created with computer-aided design software.

Such “parts search engines” could save time and millions of dollars annually by making it easier for companies to “reuse” previous designs, benefiting from the lessons learned in creating past parts.

“Designers spend about 60 percent of their time searching for the right information, which is rated as

CSIRO marine scientists have developed a technique that gives new hope in the battle to stop the spread of aquatic pests

“What we have is a probe acting as a magnet to detect a needle in a haystack,” says Dr Jawahar Patil, who designed the technique which has been successfully tested in Australia.

The new DNA probe involves seawater sample extraction of DNA, and amplification of a target specific “DNA signature or fingerprint” to identify the presence of pest species in water

To maximize a plane’s efficiency over a broader range of flight speeds, Penn State engineers have developed a concept for morphing airplane wings that change shape like a bird’s and are covered with a segmented outer skin like the scales of a fish.

Dr. George Lesieutre, professor of aerospace engineering who leads the project, says, “Airplanes today are a design compromise. They have a fixed-wing structure that is not ideal for every part of a typical flight. Being able to change t

Police who need to dust suspicious packages for fingerprints could someday rely on a robotic device to do this dangerous work.

The device, developed by scientists from U of T and the University of Calgary, offers a safe way to collect fingerprint evidence from packages that might be too dangerous for a human to approach. A study describing the development of the device, called a Robot Accessory for Fuming Fingerprint Evidence (RAFFE), appears in the March 2004 issue of the Journal of Forensi

The “scanning electron microscope” (SEM) has been a basic research tool for fifty years, and for those fifty years, scientists have been looking for better ways to observe biological samples under its beam. The problem is that the viewing chamber of the SEM must contain a vacuum (in which liquid water in tissues “boils” away). To overcome this difficulty, scientists have had to resort to all sorts of complicated procedures, including coating the specimens with an ultra-fine layer of gold, quick-freez

New, biodegradable machining compound is more effective than industry standards

Derived in part from green tea, a new biodegradable machining compound for computer hard drive manufacturing is three to four times more effective than toxic counterparts. In an industry where more than 161 million hard drives leave assembly lines each year, the new compound could significantly improve manufacturing efficiency and minimize environmental risks.

Engineered by John Lombardi of Ve

New material could mean easier manufacture of paper-thin TVs and “smart” cloth

Researchers have developed a new plastic that conducts electricity, may be simpler to manufacture than industry counterparts and easily accommodates chemical attachments to create new materials.

Developed by TDA Research in Wheat Ridge, Colo., Oligotron polymers are made of tiny bits of material that possess a conducting center and two, non-conducting end pieces. The end pieces allow the plasti

A revolutionary new type of vehicle only one metre wide and specially designed to be driven in cities is being developed by a team of European scientists.

The vehicle combines the safety of a micro-car and the manoeuvrability of a motorbike, while being more fuel-efficient and less polluting than other vehicles.

The CLEVER (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) vehicle is a £1.5 million collaborative project involving nine European partners from industry and rese

Research aids drug design; sheds light on plague and other diseases

A new technique for engineering protein crystals is helping scientists figure out the three-dimensional structures of some important biological molecules, including a key plague protein whose structure has eluded researchers until now. The technique, developed with support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), promises to help pharmaceutical compani

Fly-by-wire control systems are well established in the aerospace industry. Now participants in one IST project, PEIT, have ambitious plans to introduce the same capabilities to road vehicles. The objective? Potentially reducing road accidents within the EU by half!

“We know that 98 per cent of vehicle accidents are caused by driver error,” says project leader Ansgar Maisch of DaimlerChrysler, “so giving the driver a virtual assistant able to correct mistakes has the potential to reduce the

Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference (CMMP 2004), University of Warwick 4-7th April

A new generation of materials inspired by the ancient Greeks have been developed by scientists for use in miniaturised devices. The materials are robust, flexible films with perforations on the nano scale and have nano coatings. They are environmentally safe and will enable ultra-fast optoelectronic communication. They are produced by the self-assembly of an intricate

Food packs, containers, toothpaste tubes, wheels, glue, paints … they are all made of polymers. The world of polymers is infinite and, so, there is a great variety. The majority have been designed for a specific application; given that at times the application might be for a food container and, at others, for the superstructure of a vehicle. The specifications needed in either case are quite different.

Polymers are gigantic molecules, but they are synthesised from small compounds: monomer